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All posts for the month October, 2007

It is not a trivial transition, though I am neither especially sad or glad. They had been there for years, each of the three occupying their few square feet of space, providing familiar scenery, embodying memories. If I hadn’t needed space to use as a favor for a friend, they might have stayed there for many more years.

There was the parts cab, an early 80’s mid-sized Ford LTD. It will be leaving tomorrow. I owned two cabs like it, sequentially, and this one had provided parts for both. They were excellent taxis, with durable V-6’s, and not hard to maintain. Ford doesn’t make them anymore.

The second car was my third cab, an ’84 Crown Victoria. After my two mid-sized cabs, I decided to try the bigger, more luxurious Ford. It was, indeed a pleasure to drive. It was attractive and comfortable, but the 5-liter V8 had suffered at the hands of Yellow Cab’s underpaid, under-motivated mechanics before I acquired it, resulting in a foreshortened life. I had hoped to replace the engine, but never found an affordable one, so it remained enshrined and immobile until day before yesterday.

Gone too is Hawkeye’s old Dodge van that he had parked years ago when he was still my roommate. It could have been rehabilitated perhaps, but it had a large fuel-hungry V8. Hawkeye said I could have it, but I didn’t have the title. It served as a storage space for old computers, mostly. When I cleaned it out before the tow, though, I discovered some audio tapes, on 12-inch studio-sized reels, that I didn’t know were there. They were Hawkeye’s. I thought he had taken all his tapes. I lost contact with him some time ago. Now I need to find a large reel-to-reel machine to try to convert them to CD’s, becuase I’m sure there is some excellent and probably rare material on those tapes.

I will surely miss my imperfect sculptures in steel; my over-sized lawn ornaments. Inevitably I will need a part that one of them could have provided. But more than that, I am one who prefers not to give in to the dull aesthetics of over-organized mundane neatness. Not everything in my environment needs to be immediately useful, nor even beautiful in the conventional sense. There is something rather soothing and philosophically satisfying about an old car that is no longer expected to do anything, except to BE.

In GRAHAMSVILLE, N.Y., paranoia about students hiding firearms or WMD’s in backpacks and purses led to a rule that girls could not carry purses in school unless they were having their period. Naturally this resulted in security guards asking girls with purses if they were indeed menstruating.

As might have been expected, this question was not well received. No incidents of girls being asked for proof have been reported, but the inquisitions themselves have inspired protests in which students, including boys, have tied tampons to their clothing. One unknown student wearing only a bag over his head ran down the hallway. Perhaps the marching band should make ‘Alexander’s Ragtime Band’ their theme song.

One might hope that the educators of Grahamsville will re-write the rules, and refrain from bringing in menstrual-sniffing dogs or mandating tampons with RFID chips…but the story will live on, written in red, and be remembered forever, as it should be. It is a story not without humor, yet invasion of privacy of any kind is not funny. It shows what can happen when the man in the White House chooses to foment fear for political gain. And, it shows what can happen when we accept that fear.